Catharine Beecher

Beecher was born September 6, 1800, in East Hampton, New York, the daughter of minister and religious leader Lyman Beecher and Roxana (Foote) Beecher. Among her siblings were writer and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with clergymen Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Beecher. Beecher was educated at home until she was ten years old, when she was sent to Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut.[3][4] She taught herself subjects not commonly offered to women, including math, Latin, and philosophy.She took over the domestic duties of her household at the age of 16, following her mother's death. In 1821, Beecher founded a school for women in New Haven, Connecticut.[4] Catharine was engaged to marry Alexander M. Fisher, head of the Mathematics Department at Yale College, but he died at sea before the wedding took place. She never married.

Alexander Metcalf Fisher (1794-1822)

To provide educational opportunities for others, in 1823 Beecher and her sister, Mary Foote Beecher Perkins, co-founded the Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, where she taught until 1832. The private girls' school had many well-known alumnae.

Comprehending the deficiencies of existing textbooks, she prepared, primarily for use in her own school, some elementary books in arithmetic, a work on theology, and one on mental and moral philosophy. The last was never published, although printed and used as a college textbook.[5]

She was constantly making experiments, and practicing them upon the girls, weighing all their food before they ate it, holding that Graham flour and the Graham diet were better for them than richer food. Ten of her pupils invited her to dine with them at a restaurant. She accepted the invitation, and the excellent dinner changed her views. Thereafter they were served with more palatable food.[5]

In 1829 and 1830, Beecher led a women's movement to protest the Indian Removal Bill of President Andrew Jackson. The protest was the first national campaign on the part of women in the United States.[6]

In the bill, Jackson requested that Congress approve the use of federal money to resettle southeastern American Indians, including the Cherokee, to land west of the Mississippi River. In response, Beecher published a "Circular Addressed to the Benevolent Ladies of the U. States", dated December 25, 1829, calling on women to send petitions to Congress protesting the removal. In the circular, she wrote, "It has become almost a certainty that these people are to have their lands torn from them, and to be driven into western wilds and to final annihilation, unless the feelings of a humane and Christian nation shall be aroused to prevent the unhallowed sacrifice."[7]

Congress nevertheless passed the bill, and the Indian Removal Act became law on May 28, 1830.

In 1832, Beecher moved with her father to Walnut Hill, Cincinnati, to campaign for more schools and teachers in the frontier. There she opened a female seminary, which, on account of her failing health, was discontinued after two years. She then devoted herself to the development of an extended plan for the physical, social, intellectual, and moral education of women, to be promoted through a national board. For nearly 40 years, she labored perseveringly in this work, organizing societies for training teachers, establishing plans for supplying the territories with good educators, writing, pleading, and traveling. Her object, as she described it, was "to unite American women in an effort to provide a Christian education for 2,000,000 children in our country." She made her field of labor especially in the West and South, and sought the aid of educated women throughout the United States.[5]

In 1837, Beecher retired from administrative work. After returning East she started the Ladies' Society for Promoting Education in the West. In 1847 she co-founded the Board of National Popular Education with William Slade, a former Congressman and then governor of Vermont. In 1852 she founded the American Women's Educational Association.[8] Their goal was to recruit and train teachers for frontier schools and send women into the West to civilize the young. Their efforts became a model for future schools developed in the West.

Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak, and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social, and the moral.

It was claimed that hundreds of the best teachers the West received were sent under the patronage of this system. To a certain extent the plans succeeded, and were found beneficial, but the careers of the teachers were mostly short, for they soon married.

In The American Woman's Home,[9] published in 1869, Beecher and her sister presented a model home from a woman's perspective. The kitchen was inspired by a cook's galley in a steamship. A movable partition on wheels provided flexibility and privacy in the small home, and also served as a wardrobe. Chapters of the book discussing ventilation and heating anticipated modern central heating.[10]

On May 12, 1878, Beecher died from apoplexy.[11]

Beecher recognized public schools' responsibility to influence the moral, physical, and intellectual development of children. She promoted the expansion and development of teacher training programs, holding that teaching was more important to society than lawyers or doctors. Beecher was a strong advocate of the inclusion of daily physical education, and developed a program of calisthenics that was performed to music. She also firmly believed in the benefits of reading aloud. Catherine Beecher believed that tight corsets and bad eating habits ruined the young women's health. She believed the primary purpose of education was to develop a young child's basis for their conscience and morals.[15]

Beecher believed that women have inherent qualities that make them the preferred gender as teachers. As men left teaching to pursue business and industry, she saw the untapped potential of educated women and encouraged education of women to fill the increasing need for teachers. She considered women natural teachers, with teaching as an extension of their domestic role.[16]

Beecher thought that women could best influence society as mothers and teachers, and did not want women to be corrupted by the evils of politics. She felt that men and women were put on the earth for separate reasons and accepted the view that women should not be involved in politics, but rather, they would teach male children to be free thinkers and moral learners and help shape their political ideas.[18] (See Culture of Domesticity.)

• Ohles, John F. (1978). Biographical Dictionary of American Educators. Vol. 1. London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0837198941.
• Rugoff, Milton (1981). The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0060148591.
• Sklar, Kathryn Kish (1973). Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300015805.
• White, Barbara (2003). The Beecher Sisters. London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300099274.
• Wright, E. A.; Halloran, S. M. (2001). "From rhetoric to composition: The teaching of writing in American to 1900". In Murphy, J. J. (ed.). A short history of writing instruction: From ancient Greece to modern America. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

• Beecher family collection from Princeton University Library. Special Collections
• Beecher family papers at Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections
• Beecher family papers at Yale University Library

• Works by Catharine Beecher at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Catharine Beecher at Internet Archive
• Works by Catharine Beecher at Open Library
• An American Family: The Beecher Tradition https://web.archive.org/web/20031125234259/http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/DIGITAL/2001/beecher/catherine.htm. Accessed 1/21/10
• PBS Schoolhouse Pioneers
• Neman Library: The American Beecher Family Tradition
• PBS:The Story of American Public Education
• Lawrence University
• Michals, Debra. "Catherine Esther Beecher". National Women's History Museum. 2015